


Save The Last Dance For Me

by sidewinder



Category: Homicide: Life on the Street
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-05
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-08-18 16:55:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8169161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidewinder/pseuds/sidewinder
Summary: Some days it felt as if he couldn’t keep track of what was real and what was merely a dream.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GreenPhoenix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreenPhoenix/gifts).



John Munch was dreaming of Helen Rosenthal.

He’d managed to push her out of his mind for years. Decades, even, like most of the rest of his earlier days which he considered preferable to forget about than dwell upon as some sort of “glory years” that they'd never been. It was easier that way. But now, suddenly, he was dreaming of his old high school crush almost every night, and the dreams stuck with him with increasing clarity.

The dreams had started right after that brutally cold winter day when he’d identified her lifeless body in the parking garage. Funny how death had brought her back into his life…or into his subconscious mind, at least.

In the beginning the dreams had been fleeting, barely more than brief flashes of nearly repressed childhood memories. First it was a smile from Helen as he rode his bicycle by her house, delivering the morning paper. She’d wave at him, almost beckoning him to join her, but he had to keep on his route. Then it was a glance stolen across the cafeteria at lunch time, when he’d almost choked on his sandwich to be caught looking her way. In these dreams she was the beautiful, young, and (in his eyes, forever) perfect Helen Rosenthal who had been his dream girl, his first love: eternally unobtainable and heart-breakingly out of reach.

The dreams continued, in the days and weeks after they’d caught her killer. But with time they grew longer, more detailed and startling in their clarity, and not always reminiscent of his youthful days.

He’d see her as she now was—or had been, before her death. Older, like him, but still breathtaking, vibrant, elegant. In one dream John saw Helen sitting in The Box with Pembleton. He couldn’t hear anything even as Frank was wildly gesticulating and screaming at her, and Helen sat there calmly, staring out at John who could only watch helplessly from behind the glass.

In another dream he was tending bar at the Waterfront, and he saw her sitting at a table on the far side of the room, all by herself. He wanted to go her, to talk to her, but it was too busy. Every moment he tried to get away from the bar, someone else needed something from him until he turned to look and finally she was gone.

One night he dreamed of standing over her body in the morgue. He was alone, and all he wanted to do was to touch her face, just one time. As he reached for her she opened her eyes, her lips moving as if to speak to him but he bolted awake in fear, heart pounding, skin cold with sweat.

There had been no more sleep for John that night.

John wasn’t sleeping very well in general thanks to these dreams. He wanted to think it was simply his past coming back to haunt him—all the things, people and memories he’d tried so hard to put behind him. He found it increasingly difficult to focus on the job, his lack of sleep making him feel restless, agitated, almost paranoid. He kept thinking he saw Helen from the corner of his eye: walking through the squad room, standing on the corner of the street as he was driving by, looking out at him from open windows.

Some days it felt as if he couldn’t keep track of what was real and what was merely a dream. They were all beginning to blur together in his mind.

One afternoon he fell asleep as he was sitting in the break room trying to drink enough coffee to make it through the day. And as he drifted off, he dreamed of Helen again, sitting across from him, reaching out to touch his hand—

—but it was actually Kay, shaking him awake. “John, you all right, there?”

“What?”

Kay Howard, beautiful and unobtainable in her own way, looked at him with worry. “Maybe you should take some leave time,” she said. “You haven’t been yourself lately, not since…”

“I know,” he cut her off. _Since Helen Rosenthal._ He didn’t need to hear her say it.

“So take a few days before you become a hazard to the rest of us, not just yourself.”

“Is that an order, Sergeant?”

“Does it need to be, to get you to listen to me?” A smile only barely covered her concern, so he acquiesced. “Go on, I’ll make sure tell Gee, and make sure he understands. I don’t want to see you back here until next Monday at the earliest—provided you get some sleep.”

He knew Kay was right and he should go home and try to rest. But going home to sleep meant being plagued by the dreams again, and nothing seemed to make them go away—not drinking himself to unconsciousness, not taking legitimate sleep aids…not even taking a few illegitimate “aids” in the back of his medicine cabinet he kept on hand for such emergencies.

So he decided to head to the Waterfront instead. Working the bar wasn’t like working murder cases. He could do that even if he were sleepwalking.

He sent home Max, the afternoon bartender. Only one or two of their regular day-drunks were half passed out at the bar, and he could handle them by himself. Considering he was now off-duty, he poured himself a shot of Jim Bean and started to pull a cold one off the tap.

That was when she walked through the doorway.

Helen.

John blinked, standing frozen in place. Now he was certain he had to be dreaming. Wasn’t he? Helen was dead. She couldn’t be walking in the Waterfront, in the middle of the afternoon, looking beautiful in that same dress she’d been wearing the day of her death and smiling to see him and…

So alive.

“Johnny Munch,” she said as she approached, and her words vibrated through him like an electric hum. In all his previous dreams she’d never spoken; he’d always woken up before she could say a word. She sat on the bar stool in front of him, her eyes full of sweet fondness. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“Helen.” His own mouth was dry. He could barely get her name past his lips. He was dreaming this, he had to be…must have fallen asleep again, but… “H-how are you…? Why are you here…?”

“I’m here for you, Johnny. I’m here to take you home.”

“Home, what…? Helen, you’re…dead.”

She only smiled again, and reached across the bar to take one of his hands in her own. Her hands were so warm and her voice filled with such tenderness. “Yes. I am dead. And that’s why I’m here for you. Sometimes it’s not so easy to move on. Sometimes…people don’t realize when they’ve left this world and when it’s time to let go of it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Open your eyes, Johnny. Take a look…a _good_ look around you, what do you see?”

He didn’t get what she was going on about, not at first. He already had his eyes open, he was at the bar, _his_ bar, he was dreaming, he was…

…this place…

He looked around him as she instructed, his eyes shifting focus from Helen's beautiful face. Looked around and realized he was at the Waterfront, but it was not as it had been minutes ago. Something was strangely different. It wasn’t daytime any longer, it was night, the lights up and the world dark outside the windows. There were people all around them, people who didn’t even seem to even notice their presence. Tim was behind the bar, pouring drinks and laughing with a customer. Meldrick making the moves on some woman sitting at the far end of the bar, and Mike and Juliana sat at a table in the corner, huddled close in conversation.

“What’s going on?” he asked Helen.

“ _This_ is reality, John. This isn’t a dream. Turn around, look behind you.”

He cast a glance over his shoulder, at the wall lined with liquor bottles, and frowned. There was a photograph of him, smiling and looking unusually happy. He remembered it was the night they’d finally opened the Waterfront and invited everyone for a grand celebration. But that photo hadn’t been hanging there before, it had been the old-timey, jokey photo of him, Meldrick and Tim…

…and then he read the inscription below the photo.

**_IN LOVING MEMORY_ **

Two dates were listed beneath those words. One he recognized as his own birth date, the other…

…the day after they’d opened the Waterfront. The day they’d gone to serve a warrant on a child murderer and pedophile, but ended up knocking on the wrong door.

A brief flash of another memory he tried so hard to forget about filled his mind, the sound of gunfire, the blood of his friends splattering everywhere as they fell over him and—

“I…don’t understand,” he repeated, shaking off the dark thoughts. “I was the only one who wasn’t…”

“You were the only one…who didn’t make it, Johnny,” Helen explained softly, her voice quiet yet somehow he could hear her with crystal clarity above the noise washing over them. “Beau, Stanley, Kay, they all were shot but survived. You…it was instant. One bullet to the head. That’s why you don’t remember anything about what really happened next. That’s why…you never knew you were dead. Dead like I am, Johnny.”

He couldn’t, didn’t want to believe it. She had to be wrong, this was clearly another one of his dreams, a nightmare.

And yet, deep in his heart…instinctively he knew it was true.

He was dead. The world he’d _thought_ was real, his entire life since that moment…“So everything the past few years…it’s all  been…in my head? Or I guess not my _head_ because apparently my head was blown to pieces, but…”

“You weren’t ready to move on. It happens. But now it’s time. You’re presence has lingered here long enough…long enough to help Mike Kellerman solve my own murder. Now it’s time for me to help you leave this place behind.”

“And go where, precisely?”

“You’ll see. Come with me and you’ll find the answer to that question, and so much more you’ve never imagined.”

John pondered that, for a moment. He supposed being dead meant no more alimony payments to his ex-wives. That was a good thing, at least. And maybe… “Including who killed John F. Kennedy?”

Helen laughed. And John could only think that if he could hear a sound that wonderful still, then maybe being dead wasn’t so bad after all.

“Just one thing I want to do before we go, Helen,” he said.

“What’s that?”

John walked out from behind the bar and over to the jukebox. Selected the old 45 on it he wanted to hear, one last time. A song he’d once dreamed about hearing at the Pikesville Senior Prom, with Helen as his date, holding her in his arms and swaying to the music.

 _Blue moon you saw me standing alone_  
_Without a dream in my heart_  
_Without a love of my own_

He maneuvered over to her, through the crowd of people who could not see either one of them. “Will you dance with me, Helen?”

“I’d love to dance, Johnny.” She stood and took his hand, and then slid easily into his embrace as they moved and swayed to the music that only the two of them could hear.

 


End file.
